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Forbidden Planet

In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted to ax Pluto from our solar system’s pantheon of planets, rechristening it a “dwarf planet.” The ballot took place because Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, had detected a potential 10th planet, and the union had to decide how to categorize it. Admit the object to the roster and you pave the way for a solar system with over 100 planets. (Astronomers expect the Kuiper belt, the region beyond Neptune where the potential planet was found, to contain many similar objects.) Exclude it and you must also banish Pluto.

I expected this vote, which took place in Prague, to be the most memorable section of Brown’s “How I Killed Pluto.” Or else the moment when after sifting through thousands of telescopic images, he first discerned the moving object — “planet” means “wanderer” — that triggered the I.A.U.’s vote. Oddly, though, what stuck with me was the scene in which Brown groggily dumped cat litter instead of detergent into his washing machine, exhausted not from nights peering through high-powered telescopes at Palomar Mountain or Mauna Kea but from waking up to feed his newborn daughter.

“How I Killed Pluto” is a strange artifact, an unlikely hybrid of Dennis Overbye’s “Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos” and Anne Lamott’s “Operating Instructions.” It’s not a book about the former ninth planet — or even planetary astronomy — lightly salted with Brown’s family life. A good bit of it chronicles infant development, even including some of Brown’s blog posts about his daughter’s eating and sleeping habits during the first 240 days after her birth. “If you examine all non-bottle feeds between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.,” one entry informs us, “the average interval between feeds is 2 hours 39 minutes. If you examine the same bottle feeds you find an average of 2 hours 28 minutes between feeds. Hmmm. Eleven whole minutes. . . . Me and a bottle are almost as good as the real thing.”

This approach has a strength: Brown opens the emotional life of an actual scientist to the reader, belying the myth that he and his colleagues are automatons. But it also has a weakness: readers swept along by the thrill of a gigantic story — the discovery of a potential new planet — can be stopped by irrelevancies.

Photo

Credit
Illustration by Shannon May

Brown is most successful when he’s describing his work as an astronomer, revealing the way planning and luck combined in his discovery of at least three big objects orbiting our sun. One Thanksgiving in the late 1990s, prevented by fog from using the 200-inch Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory, he decided to check out the 48-inch Schmidt telescope instead. Because this telescope used analog technology, Brown viewed it as a “fossil.” But then he realized: old-fashioned photography beats digital imaging at capturing large sweeps of the sky, making it ideal for mapping big areas where a new planet was likely to lurk.

Still, the technology was daunting. “The last time I had touched real film,” he writes, “was when I was in third grade and my father and I had built a little darkroom.” Worse, the Schmidt photographic plates were so sensitive to red light that they could be developed only in total darkness. Happily, though, on that fateful night he met a Schmidt veteran, an expert in the ancient technology who was thrilled when Brown suggested using the telescope to map a new part of the sky.

Planet hunting is not for the lazy or the easily distracted. After his team made thousands of images, Brown had to write software to detect objects that moved, then correct for photographic distortions and imperfections. When he tells of finding, against great odds, a bright object that “might well be a planet,” the reader shares his excitement as well as his proprietary feelings. And when a Spanish astronomer, tipped off by online observatory records, claims credit for the discovery, the reader also shares his indignation.

The quest for new planets is inevitably also a quest for fame. But as the I.A.U. considered adding Brown’s potential 10th planet to the list, he made it clear that science must trump celebrity: “The idea that astronomers would actively encourage people to have the wrong view of the solar system seemed almost criminal. The idea that I was going to, overnight, become one of the most famous astronomers in the world on account of this criminal activity made me a passive accomplice. I had to do something to stop it.” Voting was not an option: Brown had never joined the I.A.U. (“I can’t get myself to fill out the paperwork,” he explains.) So from his mother-in-law’s house in the Pacific Northwest, he rang Caltech’s press office and began a successful campaign to demote Pluto.

Perhaps because Brown has a daughter, “Why I Killed Pluto” addresses gender discrimination in the sciences. In the early 20th century, when the Palomar Mountain observatories were built, they included sleeping quarters called the Monastery that, like the telescopes themselves, were off limits to women. Decades later, space science was no more integrated, particularly at NASA’s Marshall space center, where Brown’s father worked on Project Apollo. Growing up, Brown recalls, “you became a rocket engineer if you were a boy and you married a rocket engineer if you were a girl.” “Even today,” he observes at the scene of a Caltech dinner party, “things remain frighteningly skewed.” Nearly all the men at the table are scientists; nearly all their wives are not. But he has hope: “Most of my graduate students in recent years have been female. Times have no choice but to change.”

I admire Brown’s concern with gender equity, but when I read his descriptions of baby care, I couldn’t help wondering: Would a woman astronomer be taken seriously if so much of her book on planet-hunting also detailed her infant’s first months?

HOW I KILLED PLUTO

And Why It Had It Coming

By Mike Brown

267 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $25

M. G. Lord is the author of “Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science.”

A version of this review appears in print on January 2, 2011, on page BR6 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Forbidden Planet. Today's Paper|Subscribe